Wednesday, October 30, 2013

There are numerous extensions to bring authentication and access control to your Play based website. For example the Deadbolt 2 authorization system lets you define access rights per controller and method. Or you can roll your own, as this step by step guide shows.

What to do if you just want basic http authentication for the whole site? As of today there's no such thing built in. (If this changes, let me know...)

If you're serving your Play pages through Apache as reverse proxy, you're lucky.

Going through a reverse proxy is a good idea anyway:

You get the option for load balancing and failover: run multiple instances.

Run multiple Play sites on the same machine, on whatever port number, and expose them all on port 80 to the outside.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

(This post is only of interest to people having the same situation, probably finding this through Google search.)

Problem

After finishing the last batch of Windows 7 updates with some issues (blue screen), my computer was fine, all programs worked normally... except for one: IntelliJ IDEA just wouldn't start. I was running version 12.1.3, and upgrading to 12.1.6 would not fix it. Also, the earlier and still installed versions 11 would not work.

The process started normally, as seen here, but the application was missing:

The Windows event viewer had no message about it.

There was a thread dump in the IntelliJ IDEA log folder c:\users\my-username\.IntelliJIdea12\system\log\threadDumps-timestamp\...txt with a time of the program start, but the text within the file was not helpful to me.

Solution

What solves the problem is to right-click the program in the Windows start menu, and select "Run as administrator".